3. Culture wars
Democrats hoped that Republican extremism on abortion would swing millions of votes. That didn’t happen partly because many voters see each party as too extreme in its own ways.
Many voters do worry about the Republican Party’s opposition to abortion, its dismissal of climate change and its support for book bans. But the same voters worry that Democrats are hostile to policing, obsessed with race and gender and opposed to oil and gas.
The Democrats who won hard races portrayed themselves as occupying the reasonable middle — what Golden called “Maine common sense.”
They criticized Republicans as wrong on abortion, but only as a secondary campaign theme. They embraced the police and the military, running ads with people in uniform. On the environment, the candidates tried to claim the center; Kaptur called out corporations that “pollute our Great Lakes,” while Golden boasted that he had opposed electric-vehicle mandates. Gluesenkamp Perez voted against Biden’s cancellation of college debt, a policy that many working-class people find unfair.
And now?
I spent a lot of time this year tracking the Democratic campaigns in swing states and districts, and I was repeatedly struck by how similar their messages were. They were feisty, populist and patriotic. They distanced themselves from elite cultural liberalism. They largely ignored Trump.
At the end of her interview with Gluesenkamp Perez, my colleague Annie asked whether the party could change. “It’s a lot easier to look outward, to blame and demonize other people, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing what we can do,” Gluesenkamp Perez replied. “So who knows?”
But if Democrats are looking for a successful playbook, they already have the beginnings of one.
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